Aram Zucker-Scharff

“But there was actually a sense of something even more troubling — a loss of control. Journalists don’t often say this out loud, but we do think there’s an element of art to what we do. And what do most artists want, as much if not more than money? Creative control. But permeating almost every session was a sense of desperation — at regaining some kind of control over how we connect and impact with our audience. The homepages that newsrooms have sunk countless dollars and person-hours into upgrading are already dying a rapid death. Increasingly, story traffic depends on the whim of the swipes — with faceless folks in the bowels of Silicon Valley, at Google and increasingly at the social media giants of Twitter and especially Facebook, exerting an inordinate amount of power. If there was one word that I heard more than “viral” at the ONA, it was “algorithm.” Facebook has completed coded the way that millions of would-be news consumers get information, and no one knows how to crack it.”

– Looking for the soul of journalism’s new machines at ONA2014.

Adding a third rule for the news media startup naming rule-set:

1: Don’t name yourself in a way that could be easily misconstrued as ‘something will be here soon but isn’t yet’.

2: Don’t name yourself after an obscure geek reference that is used to indicate harsh terms of survival. 

3: Don’t name yourself in a way that an observer outside your city could construed as someone’s porn name.

Come on. If you don’t sort-of, at-least, just a little, maybe, try to name yourself seriously, do you really expect to be taken seriously? 

“They have made all content, including music and newspapers, worthless…”: parislemon:

Tim Adams of The Observer sat down with Thom Yorke:

In the days before we meet, he has been watching a box set of Adam Curtis’s BBC series, All Watched Over by …

Andrew Sullivan and the new wisdom of the leaky meter: Oops. Turns out Andrew Sullivan’s new project isn’t proof that paywalls work. The opposite in fact.